Nuevas estrategias de vigilancia y castigo en la escuela hoy: ingeniería psicoeducativa

It is no longer our feet but our minds that are bound in chains. The best slaves are those who do not know that they are slaves and adore their slavery. The neoliberal system educates us to “freely choose” and even desire to form part of its apparatus. Society would never have voluntarily or spontaneously “converted” to the neoliberal model in response to propaganda alone. It has been necessary to devise and instil, “through a strategy without strategies”, the spiritual, occupational, rest and leisure education necessary to generate a new neoliberal subjectivity that revels in exploitation. In this article, we analyse three of the control and punishment strategies currently being implemented or revived in education systems, as an example of the present trend towards “freely chosen” disciplinary techniques in pursuit of “voluntary self-exploitation” to the point of exhaustion: the culture of effort, the standardised measurement of academic performance, and emotional coaching applied to education. This new educational engineering deploys mechanisms of learning, submission and discipline that encourage people to “govern themselves” in the face of competition, in accordance with the principles of calculating maximum self-interest. In this new Foucauldian Panopticon, biopolitics is driven and expanded by neoliberal psychopolitics, in which control becomes internalised and is managed through emotion ; Las cadenas ya no están en nuestros pies, sino en nuestras mentes. El mejor esclavo es aquel que no sabe que lo es y que además ama su esclavitud. El sistema neoliberal nos educa para “elegir libremente”, incluso desear, pertenecer a su engranaje. La sociedad nunca se hubiera “convertido” voluntariamente o espontáneamente al modelo neoliberal mediante la sola propaganda del modelo. Ha sido preciso pensar e instalar, “mediante una estrategia sin estrategias”, los tipos de educación del espíritu, del trabajo, del reposo y del ocio, para generar una nueva subjetividad neoliberal en donde la nueva explotación es amada. En ...